


Garlanded with Lilies

by linaerys



Category: Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Genre: M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:mel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:57:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys





	Garlanded with Lilies

It was an early spring afternoon, unseasonably warm for a Vermont March, but the trees were still bare, and the ground sodden and muddy. Earlier in the afternoon they'd ventured out for a walk around the cottage grounds, but Francis had a horror of ruining his shoes, and when he suggested an afternoon of reading on the sun-porch, everyone but Bunny agreed.

Francis was reading a book assigned and loaned to him especially by Julian--one of his improvement projects. It was a first edition of some nineteenth century scholar's criticism of Aristophanes' plays. Julian liked even his criticism well-aged. It was engaging enough once Francis accustomed himself to the more personal style of the essays than he was used to in modern scholarship, but still a bit weighty for a lazy, drunken Saturday afternoon.

He was frequently distracted by Henry's reading, the slight sounds he made deep in his throat when he agreed or disagreed with something, the precise way he turned the pages, the same slow shush of paper over paper each time.

Camilla wasn't the only one who woke with bites on her after what Francis would always think of That Night. (Eventually that night would be superseded by That Afternoon, and That Other Afternoon, but before those days of all too coherent horror became a part of Francis's history, he thought of it in all capital letters, like something from a Victorian novel.)

He had a bite on his inner thigh, and one on his neck. They took much longer to heal than his usual love-bites, the ones Charles and some of his other partners had left him. He feared they'd become infected, not the least because he couldn't keep his fingers from them. He wore his collars pulled higher until the one on his neck healed, but he couldn't help pressing his fingers against it, through the fabric, when Henry's rich Greek vowels poured over them all in class.

Henry's accent was purely his own, not the carefully imitative tones of Richard, who came the closest to Julian's own pronunciations without ever achieving his careless mastery, nor Camilla's: wild and natural as she was herself, and certainly not Bunny's: charming and graceless. Henry's accent was as alien and uncompromising as he was himself--he was the closest to the Greeks they studied as any of them would ever be.

It took a while, longer than it should have, for Francis to connect the bites and the bone-deep soreness with who had given them to him. It should have been obvious but, as with most things that involved Henry, his imperviousness to human emotion made it difficult to imagine. And the other part of it didn't bear too much examination--if Henry had been the one biting and bruising him, slamming into him and making the world break apart, then what did that mean for Charles and Camilla?

Francis feared he knew the answer, had always known the answer, that Charles was not overly troubled by his perversions with Francis because of the much greater one at the core of his being, the obsession wrapped around Camilla.

Camilla dangled her feet over the edge of her chair, no more engaged in her book than Francis was in his. He was grateful to Richard for accompanying Bunny on one of his never-ending hikes, being, as he often was, an obliging fellow, getting Bunny out of their hair for a few hours, but Francis would have almost welcomed some excitement now, as long as it wasn't directed at him.

Francis shook the ice in his mug. It was getting to be time to fix himself another drink. It was a strangely warm afternoon, and it felt like spring in the glassed in sun-porch, even though the first snowdrops had barely begun to bloom.

"I'll get that for you, Francis," said Camilla. She swung herself forward and flopped out of the chair with her usual coltishness.

"I'll go with you." He leaned forward and took the glass out of Henry's hand. Henry was drinking a light red wine today, a Beaujolais Villages that he'd picked up, surprised, in a Camden liquor store. His fingers brushed Henry's, and they were just fingers, no sense of the god that had inhabited all of them that night. Still, Francis shivered as the chill of the glass and Henry's skin penetrated through the warm blanket of alcohol he'd wrapped himself in since they came here. Since . . . god, he couldn't remember when. He'd been drinking far too much lately, but had no intention of stopping, not until he'd killed every one of the brain cells that held the image of that farmer, and the fevered imaginings of what might happen if they were caught.

Charles hadn't gotten up yet. They'd all been drinking into the wee hours of the morning, and putting a sizeable dent in the supply of port and scotch that Francis had stocked here at the beginning of the term, but as usual, Charles drank more, and was hardly conscious when Francis and Camilla had helped him up to bed. Francis had smelled his winy breath, smiled at his sloppy smile, and remembered other times when he'd followed up on the mild invitation they presented.

"Should we check on him?" Francis asked as he pulled the cork from Henry's bottle. It was wet and silky between his fingers, and smelled of earthy secrets, far more appealing than the Bloody Marys he'd been drinking all morning. Francis pulled out a stemmed glass from his aunt's cabinet. The cut crystal caught the light and shattered it into little rainbows that danced over the dark wood of the sidebar.

Camilla gave him an unreadable look, but Francis thought he could detect his own worry reflected back at him. Charles was drinking a lot--they all were-- but Charles stashed bottles of his favorite scotch in his room, and just because he hadn't gotten up yet didn't mean he wasn't already quite drunk.

"I suppose," she said after a long pause. She set down the bottle of the honey gold Riesling she preferred without pouring anything from it.

They walked up the stairs. The banister needed polishing--it had been nearly a decade since the last time Francis had slid down it, and the help they had these days didn't attend to things like that. Some of the varnish had worn away, leaving patches of bare wood the texture of old silk for his fingers to glide over.

As they approached Charles's room, Francis noticed that the door was slightly ajar, and that he could no longer hear the heavy snores of Charles's in a drunken sleep. That could be because he had entered a more natural sleep, but more likely he was already awake, and quiet because he didn't want to be discovered.

Francis pushed open the door. It opened soundlessly. He could see Charles, sitting up in bed. His hands were under the covers, and he stared at Francis belligerently. "You could knock," he said with the careful enunciation he used whenever he didn't want to appear to be as drunk as he was.

"Charles," said Camilla, ducking under Francis's arm where he held the door open. Charles's expression softened noticeably when he saw her, even as he hugged the bottle that was doubtless under the blankets closer to him. "Be nice."

"I want him to leave." His expression reminded Francis of nothing so much as a petulant child. Francis knew that someday he would again find Charles sensitive and winning and he would have no choice but to desire him, but for now he shut the door without regret.

Down on the sideboard he found Henry's wine. He looped it and his own glass into the fingers of one hand, and walked out onto the sun porch again. Henry sat with one leg crossed over the other, an impenetrable frown on his face and a book open in his lap. If Francis was going to choose one picture of Henry to keep after they all graduated, this would be it. The sun made his pale skin somehow stately, and the scowl was not one of ill-temper or remoteness, but of concentration.

Henry glanced up at Francis and took the wine from his hand, cradling the base of the glass with one hand and delicately supporting the bulb between the large fingers of his other. The sturdy crystal looked fragile in his grasp.

Henry took a sip and made a pleased face. "How is our young Alcibiades?" he asked.

Francis raised an eyebrow. "That's hardly an apt allusion." Charles had been more or less hiding in his drunken stupor or in Camilla's arms since that night. He was holding up less well than any of them.

"You knew who I meant, though, didn't you?" Henry's tone was cooler than it had been moments before.

Francis frowned. Usually Henry's metaphors were crisp and perfectly suited to the moment and the personalities involved. "I haven't . . ." said Francis. "Not since that night."

He flicked his eyes up to meet Henry's briefly, and then looked down at his hands again. He kept his fingernails perfectly buffed and manicured--there was nothing he could even pretend to examine there.

Until now, Francis had no interest in turning the dreams and memories of Henry, of that night, back into reality. The dreams were enough: the stars wheeling overhead, the big, dark bulk of Henry's body blocking them out. Strong, ruthless hands bruised his upper arms, pain and pleasure mixed, like so much else that night, agony and ecstasy, the dissociation from self and the sense that he'd never been truer or closer to his own inner nature.

His fingers, with their perfectly clipped cuticles, shook from the memory and the sudden desire to experience it again. He clasped them around the crystal glass, pressing the grooves and facets into his fingers.

"Where is Camilla?" Henry asked.

Francis rolled his eyes. "She's comforting--or possibly scolding--Charles." He laughed shortly. "What did you think?"

"They're one and the same with him anyway," Henry muttered. He flipped open his book again.

Francis picked up his book and began to read again. The writer felt a great deal of affront on Socrates' behalf and Francis found himself amused, if not diverted, by the impassioned defense against a slander millennia old. Soon he felt the slightly heavier buzz this glass of wine added to the vodka already circulating in his bloodstream, and he put the book down. Gently; the binding was old.

"Did you know Robert Browning wrote a poem where Aristophanes apologized to Socrates?" Henry asked suddenly. Francis started. He had no idea that Henry had stopped reading.

"Mmmm," said Francis noncommittally. He hadn't, of course. Henry's encyclopedic knowledge of everything that even remotely touched on Greek literature wasn't something he could aspire to.

"Yes, chock full of allusions and in-jokes. Inaccessible to any but another classicist. Which was probably the point."

"Likely," said Francis. "We're an insular lot."

"I have a copy of it up in my room if you'd like to see," offered Henry.

Francis had to work to muster any interest in the volume loaned him by Julian, and couldn't possibly care about an obscure Browning poem, but he was curious what was making Henry act so unlike himself. In the weeks since that night, they'd had no more interaction than usual. Francis put the weightier silences and the slight awkwardness down to his own morbid imagination. Or if not that, it was the same tension they were all experiencing, here in the clear light of day.

But here was Henry acting amusingly like Francis himself, when he was horny and lonely and trying to get some handy straight boy into bed with him. Francis smiled and nodded his assent. He followed Henry up the steps to the room he slept in when he was here. He naturally, somehow, took the master bedroom, while Francis had always been accustomed to the "mistress" suite from childhood, and still took it now.

The proportions of the room suited Henry: the vast mahogany bed frame with its spiral posts thrusting toward the ceiling, the large masculine arm chairs and armoires. Henry didn't bother completing the fiction that they were here to look at one of his books. He kissed Francis firmly and impersonally, invading Francis's mouth with his tongue but leaving Francis feeling as though he were hardly necessary there at all, other than a prop.

"So it was you, that night."

Henry made an expression that was his version of a shrug, without anything so obvious as actually moving his shoulders. "Who else did you think it was?" He shook his head slightly. Francis took in the huge span of his shoulders, the muscular bluntness of his hands. Of course it had been Henry. Charles would never have felt so relentless, so implacable, no matter what strange force moved him.

Francis felt a frisson of a purely sexual fear. He knew what Henry wanted from him here: complete bodily submission. His soul was his own business, although he suspected Henry would take that too, and swallow it whole. And though he usually liked to play the cajoling predator, seducing the nominally straight whenever he could, here his body was already clamoring to give Henry everything he asked for.

Henry didn't seem to be in any hurry. He took of his clothes with neither speed nor languor. In the thin, late afternoon light, Francis could see the remnants of Henry's accident on his body, the lack of symmetry in the way his torso sat upon his waist, but Henry's attractiveness never stemmed from beauty as Charles's did.

"Don't look at me like that, Francis," he said. "I'm sure you have some idea how this goes."

He did, of course, but it was never so detached and clinical. There was usually wine, flirtation, liberties taken and rebuffed, or possibly allowed, moving the front of battle closer to Francis's goal.

The phone rang. Francis felt his usual compulsion to answer it--there was something so jarring about hearing it ring wondering if it was something important, an emergency perhaps, Bunny and Richard lost in the woods, finding their way to a gas station and needing to be picked up; his mind could conjure a thousand possibilities.

Henry's hand came down hard on his shoulder. "Don't answer it," he said, voice commanding. Francis still felt the compulsion--he could well imagine the caller's impatience or worry when the phone went unanswered, and if it was Bunny or Richard they would be doubly worried, knowing Francis would never let a phone just ring. But Henry's hand on his shoulder was a weight he couldn't shake off, and part of him didn't want to.

"Distract me, then," he said, warring drives making his voice breathless. Henry kissed him again, with the same implacable force as before, but this time Francis gave himself up to it rather than riding along as an observer in his own body. He drowned in it. Somewhere in the time that he'd spent being bruised by Henry's lips, the phone had stopped ringing. He heard the cool tones of Camilla's voice, remote enough he couldn't make out the words.

"See," said Henry, roughly, "you don't have anywhere else to go." He pushed Francis down on the bed. Between Henry's body and the depth of the feather mattress, he felt as if he was drowning. Henry's hands were just as strong as he remembered from that night, molding Francis's body as if he were made of clay.

There was no question of anything but Henry up hard inside him; that was what had happened that night, and if this was destined to be a poor reenactment of that, at least they wouldn't miss their marks.

"Not now," he said, amazed any part of him was able to resist Henry. He was hard and breathless, and Henry was at least hard, but this was wrong. The afternoon was for luxurious playful sex, not this. Night was needed for another consummation.

"What then?" Henry asked.

"Tonight."

Henry nodded gravely. He too saw the necessity. That's what it had been then, both of them drunk on wine and drugs and the wildness of the night. Francis pulled his clothes back into place and left to spend the rest of the afternoon napping and reading a cheap spy novel in his room.

They had one of their desultory dinners where each of them picked what they wished from the pantry and piled it on their plates like children. Bunny and Richard had made it back, cold and cross, and were now each tiredly drinking from their own bottles of wine. Richard still poured his into a glass, every careful movement some kind of reproach, but whether of Bunny or group as a whole, Francis couldn't tell. Bunny too used a glass, but from the carelessness of his pouring, Francis knew it wouldn't be long until he gave up and started swigging from the bottle itself, holding it in his fist like an oversized beer.

Francis drank wine and then scotch, sliding further into drunkenness, without diminishing his anticipation. Henry hardly acknowledged him, but the knowledge was there, simmering beneath the surface. The waiting only added savor.

They talked of this and that. Henry tried to induce Richard to give his opinion on whether Aristophanes deserved some of the blame for Socrates's execution. Richard knew something about this topic, for he didn't sidestep it into vague generalities, but quoted some examples which he felt pointed toward, if didn't exactly prove Aristophanes's culpability.

"It will never be solved," Camilla pronounced.

"Of course not," Charles answered. "That's not the point."

They grew drunker and drunker as the evening went on. Francis wondered if Henry still planned on following though on the afternoon's promise, which now felt like more of a threat. At length Richard yawned hugely, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. He never wanted to be the one to end the party--still unsure of his place, Francis assumed--but the yawn gave everyone else the excuse to retire.

Bunny tried half-heartedly to get them to continue over more brandies in the sitting room--he had a strange fascination with masculine rituals like that--but no one wanted to take him up on it. Charles and Camilla retired together, going up the stairs arm in arm as Richard watched them go, his face a picture of longing. Henry went up soon after. Francis waited a discreet five minutes or so before following himself.

He stood at the door to Henry's room, looking this way and that like some kind of character out of a melodrama, but Bunny was still attempting to cajole Richard into a sharing a few more drinks. Bunny's more strident tones floated up the stairs, while Richard's no doubt polite replies were too quiet to be audible.

Francis pushed open the door gingerly. Henry had the bedside light on, but he turned it off when he saw Francis. With the light off, Francis could see the moon shining in from the outside, the bare snowless branches of the nearby trees silhouetted against the sky.

"Come," he said. _This_ was the Henry he'd remembered and craved, the one who pushed them all into shedding the bonds of civilization and humanity, the one under whose bookish exterior lurked an ancient, barbaric soul.

He kissed Francis-- less careful this time, but no less invasive. The scotch and wine made his mouth taste smoky, and Francis was reminded of the herbs they smoked that night, the white plumes of it filtering up to the sky. The alcohol burning through his veins made Francis hard easily, but he knew that satiation might be elusive tonight--in another situation that could be embarrassing, but here it just meant time to enjoy it.

He knelt at Henry's feet and pressed his mouth into Henry's groin, warming the fabric there with his breath. Henry moaned, and Francis took that as his cue to pull his pyjamas down, and part his lips with Henry's cock. Henry made another sound, and Francis wondered, suddenly, with a detached part of his brain that seemed utterly sober, how much experience Henry had had with sex before that night. His accident, his taciturnity, his bookishness, even his money, these must have put up a barrier. Perhaps Francis was the more worldly one here.

But lack of experience did not deter Henry from reaching for what he wanted. He held Francis's jaw in a way that would have made him nip warningly coming from another lover, but from Henry seemed no more than his due--indeed a tantalizing preview of things to come.

Francis's jaw grew tired and his own cock swelled insistently against the front of his trousers, so he let Henry's fall from his lips and stood again. Henry avoided the touch of his mouth, which made Francis want to laugh hysterically. He tamped down the urge, reached up and pulled him forcefully down into a kiss. Henry fought the kiss, and pushed Francis away, down onto the bed.

Francis scrambled at his fly, and shoved his trousers down off his hips before Henry could rip them off him. He handed Henry the lube he'd secreted in his pocket. He heard when Henry flipped open the cap, a strangely modern noise in a room lit only by moonlight, filled with the sounds of only their breathing.

Henry's finger went into him roughly, and Francis was grateful for the dark and the numb relaxation granted by the alcohol in his blood. It burned and then he opened, and as soon as Henry had pressed all the way in with one finger he added another.

"Yes?" Henry asked brusquely, too fast.

Francis took a deep breath and a moment to judge as he pushed back against Henry's fingers, changing the angle until he felt that deep, perfect pressure, a warm center of pleasure building at the base of his spine. "Yes," he breathed.

Henry pushed in slower and gentler than Francis had feared, one hand guiding himself, the other cool and steadying on the side of Francis's neck where it met his shoulder. Francis pushed back against him, now past caring about anything except releasing that pressure inside him. He rarely did this, bending, yielding, giving--certainly not with Charles, who balked at anything more than sweet kisses followed by Francis sucking him off--and Henry's hardness reminded him of why he didn't--it was too easy to lose himself.

He made a space for his hand between his thighs and let Henry's thrusts drive him into the circle of his fingers. He'd forgotten this, the feeling of coming apart in someone else's hands, of completely giving up control. Henry kept a slow, inexorable pace. It seemed in Francis's drunken state that he could stay like this forever, Henry rocking into him as Francis pushed back, riding a building wave of pleasure that would never crest.

He was distracted enough, lost in his own sensations, that it took a moment between Henry's speeding up, gripping Francis's hips harder, and Francis's realization that it would soon be over. He tightened his grip on himself and let Henry use him, hard and bruising, until Francis spilled into his hand and gritted his teeth through Henry's last frenzied thrusts.

They stayed like that, joined in bodily intimacy that didn't feel awkward now, no matter what depths of unvoiced thoughts lay between them at other times. Henry's chest was sweaty against his back. His big hands still held Francis, hip and thigh in his grip.

"I thought . . ." said Henry, resting his chin on Francis's shoulder. His voice was dreamy for a moment, un-Henry-like, but then it hardened. "I thought it would be more like that night." He sighed and started to disengage. "But you are just mortal."

If he let himself, Francis would be hurt by that, broken where he might never mend. Instead he shoved Henry's considerable bulk off him, and replied, cool as glass, "So are you."

  



End file.
